instagram: HALP

So, as you may have seen, I’ve just started up a whatthelog instagram account. And, needless to say, I’m a little bit lost. I’ve had a couple conversations with the wonderful people of Litsy about it, but I thought I’d open up the conversation to y’all. So – if you have answers to any of these questions, please comment away! I’d be really grateful 🙂

How good do you think your photographs should be?

Here are three of mine: I was pretty proud of the one of More Happy Than Not, less so about the others. What makes a good instagram photo, do you think? Is minimalist better? I personally find that minimalist pictures all tend to look a little bit same-y, though that’s just my opinion.

I’m definitely making more of an effort with these pictures than I do on Litsy (I kind-of see Litsy as a more informal place, for some reason). However, is it enough?

How many times should you post per day?

Right now I’m doing #diversemar so I’m posting once per day – however, I’m not sure if that’s getting me a lot of followers, or displaying my collection of books well enough. On the flip side, though, I don’t want to spam people with posts either!

How many hashtags do you use?

Can you really #book #books #reading? Do people actually go through these tags? I’ve only really gone through #diversebooks, #diversebookbloggers, and the monthly tags.

How do you stop worrying about followers?

I guess this is more of a general social media question than an Instagram one. However, every time I get a new social media, I always start worrying about followers – why I don’t have as many as some people, why I lose followers, and what makes people start to follow me in the first place. I end up worrying about it so much that I don’t want to use the social media anymore! Silly I know, but I think most people do it.

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6 thoughts on “instagram: HALP”

I don’t know I’m commenting since I have yet to post a picture on Instagram 😀 . I love all three of your photos by the way. And don’t worry about followers, keep doing what you enjoy. People will come and go but friends will stay 🙂 .

I’ve been on bookstagram coming up to a year and I have found that posting once a day is the best schedule to have in terms of gaining and maintaining followers – I notice quite a large drop in followers when I post every other day because of lack of photos, which is sad becomes sometimes I don’t have the time for taking photos! In terms of tags I have a set of tags that I keep in my clipboard and then paste into the comments section of the post, but to be honest I’m not sure how helpful they are in terms of gaining likes – I will sometimes make the names of books hashtags in my actual posts but again, I’m not sure how successful that is! With your photographs my main advice is do what you want! Everyone talks about ‘themes’ and if that works for you, great, but if not then it doesn’t matter. I still worry about followers, but at the end of the day I love bookstagram because I love discussing books, and it doesn’t matter whether I broadcast my love to 800 or 8 followers.

Thank you!! Your advice is so helpful! I’ve been trying to do one a day and that’s been okay so far, though I have missed a couple of days. And the idea of keeping tags in your clipboard is so good, thanks again! I am definitely going to do that.

I’ve been quite busy, but hopefully now that I’m on spring break I can catch up on posting 🙂

Haha I’m like that on litsy – I feel like people don’t expect as high quality pictures on there, which is kinda relieving. And that’s a really good shout about the algorithm. I have no idea why we can’t just see what’s on our feed, it is ridiculous!